Fire Aftermath

I took a walk in the neighborhood last night and took some pictures. The landscape around here is like another planet. I enjoy hiking the local trails but I suspect they’ll be closed for a while until things start to recover. We had a similar fire back in 2007 and it is remarkable how quickly things grow back. I was speaking with our local park ranger and he reports the deer are already returning, though nobody is exactly sure where our local pride of mountain lions are right now. When these trees catch on fire, the burn continues inside long after and often down into the roots. Some of these trees will one day just fall over.

Save Time with TextExpander (Sponsor)

This week MacSparky.com is sponsored by TextExpander, the easiest way to start automating your work on Mac, iPad, and iPhone. TextExpander is a text replacement tool. With it, you can type a phrase like “ccell” and it will automatically fill in your cell phone number. But TextExpander is so much more than that.

Using TextExpander, you can have it automatically create the date and time. For example, when I talk with someone on the phone related to the day job and want to keep notes about the conversation, I just type “xdts” which, in my head, means date and time string. Then TextExpander automatically creates something like this, “2018-03-28 06:42”. If I need to put the full date in a letter, I just type “fdate” and TextExpander puts in the current date, like this, “March 28, 2018”.

TextExpander can still go deeper. It can use the contents of your clipboard to auto-fill in snippets. It can press keyboard keys, like the tab key, to automate filling in forms on the web or creating an email. You can get it for yourself and your team members so you can share snippets with your team members.

I’ve done so much with TextExpander over the years that I even have a page of snippets I’ve created that you can download ranging from movie to reviews to conference calls. One of my personal favorite groups is foreign thanks where you can say thank you to people in most language. Sending an email to a French friend, just type “french thanks” and TextExpander gives you “Merci”. It’s like your own, personal translator.

To learn more, head over to TextExpander.com and let them know you heard about it at MacSparky in the “Where did you hear about us” field.

Back Home

Thanks everyone for the kind wishes. I’m finally back home now that the fires have subsided and I’m back at work.

Shifting Winds

This week has been a challenging one for me. Monday morning, I received a text message that there was a new wildfire near my home, The Silverado Fire, and to be on alert. So throughout the morning, I kept working with one eye on the reports and maps showing the fire’s progress. The wind was roaring Monday in gusts up to 60MPH. It’s a local condition we call the Santa Ana Winds, but the good news was the Santa Ana’s were blowing the fire away from my house.

Unfortunately, shifting winds are not always just a metaphor. Sometimes shifting winds just mean shifting winds. And at about 3 pm Monday, the winds shifted, and fire came roaring toward my sleepy little community of Foothill Ranch. The emergency text message arrived shortly later that we were under a mandatory evacuation order. The fire hadn’t arrived yet, but it was on the way. So all of my podcasts and blog posts about backups paid off. We packed up a few valuables, pictures, and hard drives and took off. I can tell you that the experience of evacuating your neighborhood while everyone else is also evacuating your neighborhood is pretty surreal. Everyone is packing their cars, smiling and acting like they aren’t worried while they are, in truth, all a little terrified. The smoke and ash were already blowing in, and police cars were driving up and down the street, blasting warnings to evacuate. Everybody was a bit on edge.

We stayed with family Monday night and watched some scary news coverage. I live in a tract of homes in the foothills. They were built with fires in mind. Our roofs are fire-resistant. We keep the brush cleared around our little community’s perimeter like some sort of ancient fire moat. The California firefighters are pros and understand wildfires. There isn’t a lot they can do when it is burning through open land. However, when it gets near homes, they have a tremendous arsenal of fire fighting tools. So the fire burned around the perimeter of our community Monday night. The park where I take my dog caught on fire, and to the extent a park can burn down, it burned down. However, no homes were lost. All was good.

We returned home yesterday only to find more shifting winds and more evacuation orders. We had another long night last night, but again, no homes were lost while the Silverado fire continues to linger in the neighborhood. We are once again with family, hoping we can get back home today. My family and home are safe, and the fire is very unlikely to pick my little tract home as the one it takes out.

We are very fortunate, and California firefighters are very good. Everyone in my community is safe. None of the houses in my community were lost. I can’t help but feel that if this fire’s siege of my community hasn’t broken through in two days, it’s not going to break through. The mandatory evacuation order is still in place, but we’re hoping it gets lifted later today. I just want to get back home, take a nap, and resume something close to normal life. Thanks for all the kind tweets and emails. I haven’t responded to many of them, but I appreciate them all.

Focused 111: Environmental Focus, with Erik Fisher

Erik Fisher joins Mike and me on this episode of Focused to talk about internal and external distractions, setting up your environment for focused work, dealing with unexpected changes, and building self-awareness.

This episode of Focused is sponsored by:

Teamistry: The stories of unsung teams who pioneered new ways of working to achieve the unexpected. Listen now.
Blinkist: Read 3000+ books in 15 minutes or fewer. Start your 7-day free trial.

Mac Power Users 559: Research Apps

A few new research applications have popped up the last year, joining some true Mac legends. To see what is what, I went on a quest and have returned to share with Stephen the wisdom I gained while exploring. Listen in on the latest episode of Mac Power Users.

This episode of Mac Power Users is sponsored by:

The Intrazone by Microsoft SharePoint: Your bi-weekly conversation and interview podcast hosted by the SharePoint team.
Hover: Make a name for yourself. Get 10% off any domain name.
1Password: Have you ever forgotten a password? You don’t have to worry about that anymore.
TextExpander from Smile: Get 20% off with this link and type more with less effort! Expand short abbreviations into longer bits of text, even fill-ins, with TextExpander from Smile.

Automators 61: Widget Home Screen Nerdery

In this episode of Automators, Rosemary and I look at the widgets in iOS 14 and how you can automate to make sure you have the data you need under your thumb.

This episode of Automators is sponsored by:

Sync Up, a OneDrive podcast: Takes you behind the scenes of OneDrive.
FastScripts: Powerful script management utility. Instant access to your scripts, by keyboard shortcut or menu bar. Get 20% off for a limited time only.

iFixit Murders a New iPhone 12

It certainly didn’t take iFixit long to tear a new iPhone 12 apart. They’re doing it right now with a live stream that I can not stop watching. It’s kind of hypnotic. One bit of insight that stands out is how many of the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro parts are the same.

Hyper-Scheduling Technology

Yesterday I wrote about the task management and your calendar. Today, I’d like to share some of the technology behind how I go about blocking these schedules. Creating calendar items can be tedious. Using a tool like Fantastical makes a big difference, but when blocking a whole week out, you want some automation at your back. For me, it’s been an evolution.

Block and Copy

You can copy and paste calendar events in most calendar apps on the Mac, including Apple’s own Calendar app. Command + C and Command + V are your friends. If you have similar blocks you use throughout the week, you can set them up once, then copy, then paste as many times as needed. You may need to make adjustments to start and end times (or even descriptions), but that is way easier than starting from scratch. Blocking and copying calendar events on the iPhone and iPad are not as easy and more time-intensive. Block and copy is a perfectly acceptable way to set your blocks, particularly if they vary a lot from week to week. As my schedule started getting more consistent, I looked at other options for automating calendar blocks.

Repeating Events

All calendar apps can create repeating calendar events with a high degree of customization. If you want a block every Tuesday at 1 PM or on the last Sunday of every month at 3 PM, you can do that. I tried this for a while but eventually gave up on it for two reasons.

First, I was not too fond of the confirmation box that shows up every time I adjusted a repeating calendar event. It was like hitting a speed bump multiple times every day. It started as an annoyance but quickly became unbearable.

Second, recurring events go into the future, potentially, forever. If you block most of your days going months (or years) into the future, Scheduling anything in the future become more difficult because, according to your repeating events, you are already very busy every day, forever.

Automatic Event Creation

As I explained in yesterday’s post, I don’t want to plan blocks much more than a week into the future. As Yoda said, “Always in motion the in the future.” Blocks planned out more than a week in advance rarely go down as planned. Yet there is enough consistency in my schedule that I’d like to automate the process of generating the 25-ish calendar events I want every week.

The easiest way I found to do this was with a Shortcut that runs through a “Create Event” task for each day in the following week with my standard blocks. You can download a simplified version on your iPhone or iPad with this link. I run this script every Saturday afternoon. It takes just seconds and fills my week with blocks. Since they are not repeating events, I can move and change them at will without seeing that blasted confirmation box. Moreover, since they only go one week into the future, if I’m planning an event for a month from now, my calendar isn’t overly cluttered.

In addition to generating the calendar events, my Shortcut script also inserts alarms for most events to trigger when the block starts. This reminds me to change gears and helps me from getting lost in any particular block.

Daily Evolution

Often, but not always, I need to make adjustments to these blocks as I go through the day. Stuff happens. It’s okay. I do, however, adjust the calendar to reality when that happens. Sometimes it means moving a few blocks around in the coming days. That’s okay too. Regardless, I take a screenshot of my weekly calendar on Sunday night, and I always go back to look the following weekend to see how the week went down compared to my plans. Sometimes I learn a thing or two comparing reality to the theoretical.

The Paper Option

I’ve also tried blocking entirely with paper. For that, I’d recommend a nice pen and a notebook that makes you want to use it. The trouble with doing this on paper for me was that I didn’t have the notebook with me at all times. Digital events are in my pocket, on my wrist, and send me notifications.